During the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, I was working as
the news assistant on the night city desk of The New York Times and I vividly
recall the tension in the newsroom the few days prior to the public
announcement of the crisis.

We knew something very unusual was up when the foreign
editor asked us to call every foreign correspondent immediately and tell them
to go out and find out what was going on, no matter what the hour was.

All we knew in the newsroom was that the President of the United States of America
had called up the publisher and asked him not to publish "Scotty"
Reston's column for the next day's paper.

That would seem to have offered a good clue to what was
going on.The column was pulled, but no
one at the paper, including James "Scotty" Reston, the paper's top
Washington correspondent at the time, who would later go on to become the
executive editor, had any idea what the President was concerned about as the
column was relatively innocuous.

While waiting for the calls to the correspondents to go
through, everyone in thenewsroom speculated
on what would cause the President to make such an extraordinary request.

It came down to three possibilities: China was about to explode an atomic weapon; Berlin was about to become the center of a very major
crisis; and something might be up involving Cuba, which had rather recently
been invaded by some CIA-supported exiles.

Three days later, President Kennedy went on television to
announce that the Soviet Union had shipped and was installing intercontinental
ballistic missiles in Cuba
that threatened the United States
and that the United States
had told the Soviet Union it would impose a
quarantine if they were not removed very soon.A quarantine was the polite word for a naval blockade, which is a
classic "act of war."

This was serious.

"13 Days" is the superb film that recreates the
crisis as seen through the eyes of Kenny McDonnell, a former classmate of
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy at Harvard who was serving as a special
assistant to the President, John F. Kennedy.The President and the Attorney General were very close with Mr.
McDonnell, though the movie probably overemphasizes the relationships to a
certain degree.

Kevin Kostner, who had been directed by Donaldson in
"No Way Out," a political thriller about spies in Washington
during the Cold War, plays Mr. McDonnell with a crew cut and a broad Boston accent and
appropriate gravitas.

John F. Kennedy is played by Bruce Greenwood and Robert F.
Kennedy is played by Steven Culp.Both
are excellent but Greenwood's
performance is really quite sensational, conveying the hesitant intelligence
that must somehow sort out perilous options and the trusting confidence in his
younger brother's inherent gutsiness and raw instincts.They are an inseparable and potent team and
combined with O'Donnell's flinty festyness and political acumen they are barely
able to carry the day with the hawks in their administration and the
overreaching miscalculations of their Soviet counterparts.

In his December 25, 2000 review in The New York Times, Elvis
Mitchell makes the following observation:

"Mr. Donaldson has embraced the notion of depicting
many moments as either shouting matches or snatches of tense contemplation
behind closed doors. No one creeps on eggshells here; characters stomp on them
hard enough to detonate them. It's possible that the screenwriter David Self
chose the 'Clash of the Titans' school of drama to give the material a rumble
and try to shake away the stench of history."

Mr. Mitchell is right about the eggshells but the script is
intelligent and intelligible and has just the right amount of elegant and
restrained hysteria: we catch the President looking out a window at the White
House at his wife and children and Mr. O'Donnell visiting his son at football
practice.

In the December 12, 2000 edition of The Village Voice, J.
Hoberman wrote that:

"Galloping into the holiday season with a cloud of dust
and a hearty 'Hi-yo, Silver,' Thirteen Days evokes a thrilling yesteryear of
beehive hairdos, afternoon editions, and open-top limousines - when being
president of the United
States actually meant something. The veteran
director Roger Donaldson and young screenwriter David Self have risen above
their previous work to fashion a tense and engrossing political thriller from
the transcripts of tapes made in the secretly bugged White House offices where
John F. Kennedy and associates managed the potential Armageddon known as the
Cuban missile crisis."

Hoberman adds that:

"Thirteen Days adds little to what is known about the
missile crisis but subtracts quite a bit. The Cubans are barely a factor - although,
according to Russian archival material published in 1997, Castro panicked and
began agitating for a nuclear first strike. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev,
the man who blundered into the crisis and who, more than anyone else, found a
way to blunder out, is totally invisible."

The film plunges right into the crisis without giving the
background of the aborted invasion of Cuba, the sensitive subject of the
President's religion lack of enthusiasm for godless Communism, and the very
conservative political background of the president's father, who was a former
Ambassador to the Court of St. James who was an admirer of Hilter.

Perhaps most importantly, the firm makes no reference to the
fact that Adlai E. Stevenson had twice been the Democratic Presidential
candidate and was widely regarded as the most intellectual liberal in the
country.A great many liberals had
anticipated that President Kennedy would appoint Stevenson as Secretary of
State and were shocked that he was named Ambassador to the United Nations, a
much less important post.

It does, however, very clearly depict the antipathy that the
President had for Stevenson and the concerns of the Attorney General that he
would not be strong enough to confront the Russians at a very critical juncture
in the crisis at the United Nations.Stevenson, of course, would show his mettle with his famous "I wait
til hell freezes over" comment.

The crisis has more ups and downs than the public was then aware
of and if the movie has a major flaw it is that it wastes little time in
analyzing whether there were other choices than a blockade since American
missiles in Turkey were as
threatening as those that were being assembled in Cuba.It conveniently overlooks the Monroe Doctrine
as a colonialistic and imperial presumption that it is fine for the United States
to interfere in the interior affairs of foreign countries in its
hemisphere.Why not let Hitler have Europe? This, of course, was deep into the Cold War and
the country had already been brainwashed by McCarthyism about the evil
Communists.

The President and the Attorney General and Mr. O'Donnell
were heroic in their patient search for a way out of the crisis, which was very
real.

Khrushschev's decision at the last winter to withdraw in
exchange for an unannounced plan by the United
States to withdraw from Turkey six months later was
stunning and hopefully someone will make a film about the crisis from the
Soviet viewpoint.

The fact that the nation's defense alert status was upped
without the President's consent and that the rules of engagement were being
tested and that coups were not easy to analyze were elements that the general
public was not alert to at the time.

The Infinifilm DVD includes several documentaries on the
crisis.

This is a very important film that not only terrifies
fail-safe scenarios but also gives a lot of insight into the character of both
President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy and they come off admirably
under pressure.